Get Faster Answers to Your Support Questions with Expert Chat

By now, you are using the new SAP ONE Support Launchpad to engage with SAP Support, access support applications, and manage your SAP products. Did you know that you can streamline your problem-resolution process even further by using our new Expert Chat functionality?

The Expert Chat program is built right into the incident form for your convenience. To get started, just begin the process of submitting an incident, filling in the relevant information about your problem or question. Then, if a support engineer is available for the selected component, you will see a green “Start Chat” button next to the “Submit” button in the incident screen:

You will be immediately connected with a knowledgeable SAP support expert who will work with you to answer your question or resolve your issue right away. The information you’ve entered into the incident field will be transferred to the support engineer to aid in the resolution of your issue. The support representative will create an incident for you containing your chat transcript and, if unable to resolve your issue immediately, they will continue the incident submission process for you. There is no duplication of effort!

Keep in mind, if you do not see the Start Chat button in your incident wizard, either there is no available engineer at that time or Expert Chat has not been rolled out yet for your selected component.

not sure why I see your comment only now. No, no invoice being sent! :-). This is a new service, an additional communication channel, that is offered as part of the normal Support Services, which are covered by the normal maintenance / subsciption fees.

To be frank, I’m not an expert on the VAR partner experience, but I can ask the Chat team to see if they can provide any best practices advice here. Thanks, as always, for your contribution to the discussion!

You’re right, a chat session still counts as an incident and this would affect the partner’s correction share if the topic of the chat session is regarded as 1st/2nd level.

That’s why it is very important for VARs to request SAP to block their end customers from creating incidents. That way, at least you can be sure your customers don’t initiate incidents or chats directly with SAP. See SAP Note 1285423 for more details on this.

Bernhard is exactly right. Some components have not yet been rolled out to chat, but we will see some big rollouts coming in the next two weeks. Chat support for various components have been rolling out progressively for quite a while, but by the end of the month, we should see the majority available. Have you tried a few different components to see if you can see the Start Chat button for some, if not others?

Also, there is the possibility that at the time you tried to start your chat, the support engineers were busy assisting other customers and were not available to start a chat at that time. This would also result in not seeing the Start Chat button.

It depends on the application/ solution you are using. If you have a basis related issue, you can use it. Similarily sybase, APO, CRM etc are using it already. By July wk1, most of the areas would be working on it. Just that you need to try it out. 😎

Of course please take into account that there is no possibility to analyze complex problems via chat, which would very likely require SAP Support to log into the customer’s system to check exactly what happens and also be aware that questions like system configuration consulting will be handled similarly to the way it goes via Incidents in my opinion.

Chat can be used an alternative for the incident process for whatever questions or issues you’re having. You’ll be connected directly with a support engineer with the opportunity to investigate and resolve your issue right away – simple or complex.

If, for some reason, the engineer is not able to resolve the issue, then, yes it will be handled like an incident and routed to the appropriate team (member) for further investigation. However, it’s important to understand that chat support is not intended as an answering service or call processing-type interaction. You will be connected with a real, live SAP support expert who is trained in the component you are contacting us about. We expect that the majority of chat inquiries will result in resolution of the problem and the minority will require further routing to next level specialists.

I’d love to hear about your experience after trying out this new option. We’re happy to hear about ways we can improve your experience, so please be specific when letting us know what went well and what we can do better.

I’ve gotten a bit of information back from the partner team on this topic. For right now, there are not plans established to extend chat for VAR customers and an incident initiated via chat would be billed the same as a regular incident. Adding chat functionality to the partner solution manager is a question that is being investigated as a possibility for future offering by the team, but there is no plan for it at this time.

You may start a new chat by opening the incident wizard as if you were ready to submit a new incident, but it will be logged as a new incident. In other words, you may contact Support via chat on the same topic you’ve already submitted an incident for, but there is not currently the option to open a chat from within an existing incident.

SAP has been wonderful all through to accept and capitalise on innovative new tools even the consulting on issues is very sensitive yet this chat can be bring in a direct and more responsive tool than that laid back email incidence reporting and waiting, in that conventional method your eagerness was not relayed back to the backoffice support team to get back even faster where as on chat prompt response on burning queries can bring a little solace for important issues.. Please unfold more. Have a god luck!

We would like to use this nice functionality but realized it does not work for us. IE died without any feedback and Chrome reported the site not to be available. Potentially respective ports are blocked and GotoAssist dies for that reason. Searching your Homepage for GotoAssist requirements (like e.g. ports) I did not find anything. Can you please collect the requirements and publish them on you hompepage?

Is there a list of components for which Expert Chat has been rolled out or not rolled out?

My customer is never seeing an expert available and there is no way to tell, that I am aware of, if that is due to a resource not being available or if the component does not have Expert Chat rolled out for it. If it was the latter, we could wait until it become available rather than keep trying in vain.